The Far Lands are a phenomenon of Minecraft
world generation that occur 12 and a half million blocks away from spawn. There's
the Far Lands, the Farther Lands, the Fartherer Lands... and the Farthest Lands,
along with corner variations for all of them, and they all occur for distinctly
different, but similar reasons. The Far Lands haven't always looked like this
though. If we remove the fix that got rid of the Far Lands in Minecraft Java Beta 1.8,
and use the Cubic Chunks mod to remove the games depth and height limits entirely, we can
encounter the Sky Far Lands, the Void Far Lands, and every combination within. We'll get to
that. This already seems like quite a lot, and well... it is... but that's what I'm
here for. Later on I'll explain why the Far Lands happen, but for now, let's
get started with the first Far Lands. We need to rewind the clocks all the way back
to February 27th, 2010. This is the very first version of Minecraft to have infinite
terrain generation, but as you can see, this terrain is a lot more basic than what we
have today. If you were to try and travel to the Far Lands in this version, you would
encounter a wide array of visual glitches not all that dissimilar to what I showed off in
this video. But thanks to a mod provided by RVH, we can just get rid of these problems so
I can get on with the video. Minecraft's first ever Far Lands appear over 33.5
million blocks away from the spawn point. These Stone Wall Far Lands have a little
bit of variation from world to world. They can generate as a solid wall, they can have
these spikes that oscillate every 4 blocks, or the whole thing can be recessed
by 4 blocks, giving way to a thin, but very long chasm going all the way down
to the bottom of the world. Once you go past these initial 4 blocks, the whole thing is
one big solid never ending field of stone, and the corner Far Lands within this version
are also just stone. This specific version of Minecraft has no cave or ore generation, but the
two versions of InfDev that came right after this did re-introduce those elements, and that does
affect how the Far Lands look. It's kinda weird. Two weeks later on March 27th, Minecraft's
terrain generation would fundamentally change from the classic style of old, to an all new world
generation system. But this is not the terrain of Minecraft Alpha. This terrain generation had a
much thicker hill structure, and it had a Far Lands shape entirely unique to it. This was
also the version of Minecraft that moved the Far Lands from 33.55 million down to 12.55 million
blocks. The next major change to Far Lands terrain happened on April 20th, 2010, and gave it the
shape that I know you're all familiar with. I want to start off this section with something
that I've never properly explained before. Why are the Far Lands shaped like this? Well, I
finally understand it, so let's break it down. The Minecraft overworld surface is dominantly
shaped using a pair of 2d perlin noise maps called "low noise" and "high noise". These are
then blended together using a third noise map called "selector noise", with its purpose being to
JUST to blend the other two together. I feel like this is intuitively difficult to understand,
so let's see it visually. In front of us is a "from the side" two dimensional slice of a
Minecraft world. To make this as easy as possible, let's crank up the factor, or scale slider on
both of them. Heh, it already kind of looks like the Far Lands. Now, watch what happens when
I change the period slider for either of them, which is stretching and squeezing that noise-map.
Now, it's visually obvious that there are two noise-maps, because it's easy to tell them
apart. Okay, let's keep one of them stretched, one of them squeezed, and then change the
offset slider for "selector" noise. Now can you see what's going on? Selector noise takes
both of them, and blends them together. As you might have intutively gathered, the shape
of the Far Lands happen when this factor scale goes wildly out of control within the
range of a single Minecraft block. But, why? Do you remember this image from earlier? It's
a noise-map with a bunch of arrows on top of it. But these arrows are how the noise map itself
forms. The arrows start out as points on a grid, and the underlying math determines where they
point. On average, they point towards areas of "more white". White means land, black means
air, and a perfect gray is where that transition happens. Well, deep within Minecraft's code
lies an equation that aids in smoothing it out a little. And part of how that equation is
formed is by taking any given terrain coordinate, with its decimal point, minus that same terrain
coordinate, but with the decimal rounded off. This is ALWAYS supposed to equal a value between 0
and 1. But there's a problem. This left number is a floating point number, which effectively has
no limit, and this right number is an integer, which maxes out at 2.147 billion. When this value
maxes out, it doe not change anymore. So then, what happens if you were to do this minus
this? You would get a number that is much higher than 1. And when that happens, the
scale of Minecraft's terrain, does, this. Yeah, when Minecraft's terrain exceeds 12.55
million blocks, that first equation is able to escape the safe zone of 0 to 1, which then gets
raised to the power of 5, and it causes the scale of Minecraft's terrain noise to become effectively
infinite, at least within the boundaries of a Minecraft world. Next question. Why are the
Far Lands tunnel shaped? Simple. The equation that calculates Minecraft's final noise map gets
locked to a static, unchanging value along your direction of travel, so, it no longer even really
resembles a noise-map, and only changes along the axis perpendicular to the Far Lands. Since this
value doesn't change as you travel deeper into the Far Lands, we get tunnels. But what happens
when both the x and z coordinates exceed 12.55 million blocks? Well, as I'm sure you're all
familiar with, we get, the corner Far Lands. Welcome to the Stack. The Corner Far Lands. A
scene perhaps more mysterious than the Edge Far Lands. How do we even go about explaining why
these are shaped the way that they are? Well, if you've kept up with me thus far, it's
quite simple. Within the corner Far Lands, the low and high noise maps are frozen in
a fixed state, but selector noise is not. To make this as easy as possible to understand, I'm gonna take a shortcut. When Minecraft's
selector noise breaks 1.004 billion blocks out, this is what the terrain will look like
when the blending it provides no longer occurs at all. Minecraft is just made up of
never-ending, never changing flat layers. Let's use this specific layer at the end of
the Corner Far Lands as an example. To my left, the layer is just never ending and flat, and to
my right, that very same layer is still there, but it's all broken up, and that's solely
because of selector noise. Whenever a distinct layer drops down, or cuts off, whether
that be like this, or the plateau like hills, that is selector noise doing its thing, and that
is why the Stack takes on the shape that it does. In order to move on with this Far Lands iceberg,
we need to back up. Remember before when I mentioned that Minecraft's selector noise, the
one that blends things together, breaks at 1.004 billion blocks. Welcome to the Farther Lands,
the next tier of this iceberg. Just as the low and high noise breaking causes the Far Lands,
the next noise map to break in this chain of insanity is the selector noise, meaning, the
low and high noise can no longer be blended together anymore. But, why 1 billion blocks
out? Well, just as those two increased at a frequency of 171.103 per block, selector
noise only increases by 2.138 per block, so, here we are. The Farther Lands are the
last unique set that we can witness within the boundaries of a Minecraft world... or at
least, that's what they want you to think. Minecraft in its unmodified form has two world-gen
limitations that WE need to break in order to go further down this iceberg. The first is the
height and depth limit. Long story short, Minecraft world chunks for versions 1.2
through 1.17 are 16 by 16 by 256 blocks, and are horizontally stitched together as the
world generates. This works just fine for the limitations that we just covered...
but what about the limitations that occur vertically? 256 blocks of height is
just not gonna cut it anymore. Thankfully, there exists a mod that changes Minecraft's world
chunks to generate instead as 16 block cubes, and allows for them to be stitched together
both horizontally, and now, vertically, without limitation. While Minecraft's low and high noise
break at 12.55 million blocks horizontally, they break at double that distance vertically, making
way for the Sky Far Lands, and the Void Far Lands. This is where the Far Lands iceberg begins
to lose sunlight. One key item to note is that the entrance to these Far Lands are not
visibly stretched like they are for the Edge Far Lands, and the reason for that lies in where
these Far Lands occur. They're twice as far away, meaning that the low and high noise scale at half
the frequency vertically, meaning, the Edge Far Lands stretch vertically, and these new ones do
not. If your brain isn't as fried as mine was researching this video, then you may have already
realized that if we can have a Far and Farther Lands, that means we also have to have vertical
variations for both of those as well. Here's some more food for thought. What happens if you're in
the Corner Far Lands, and you move vertically all the way through the Void Far Lands and into the
Void Farther Lands. Well, you would be in the Corner Far Void Farther Lands. I don't know how
else to describe it, but I do know how to show it. This tesseract looking thing is a 3D outline
representation of the entire Far Lands stack. The inner glowstone portion is meant to represent
Minecraft's normal terrain. When we enter this green bit, that's me representing the Edge Far
Lands. If I go up a layer, Edge Sky Far Lands. One more up? Edge Far Sky Farther Lands.
Okay, okay, this is getting out of hand. WHAT DO YOU MEAN THERE ARE TWO SETS OF FAR LANDS
BEYOND THIS? The FARTHERER AND FARTHEST LANDS? So, here we are, at the last two set of
Far Lands that we can witness within the boundaries of a 32-bit Minecraft world. In order
to actually get to them, we’re gonna have to use 1.12’s customized worlds feature, because these
Far Lands actually appear so far away that they are multiple quadrillions of blocks away, which is
far beyond our 2.147 billion limit. The Fartherer and Farthest Lands appear at the location where
low and high noise maps break, but instead at their 64-bit equivalent distances. If we take
the highest 64 bit number, and divide it by the highest 32-bit number, and then multiply that by
where the Far and Farther Lands are, that is where the Fartherer and Farthest Lands will respectively
appear. Whether or not these Far Lands would be noticeable in-game if you could even travel to
those coordinates without mods is a matter of debate, and unfortunately, it’s difficult for me
to really explain what exactly is going on here. That’s where this whole discussion kinda falls
apart, and also changes in scope. If I wanted to continue on from this point on, I would need
to use a pretty game-changing mod that allows for us to travel beyond Minecraft’s 32-bit limit, and
into the 64-bit range of coordinates, but I have a personal reservation with that. This mod really
is game-changing. It radically alters Minecraft’s code so much to even allow for world generation
out that far. Opening up that Pandora’s Box, and diving into all of those limitations would
honestly have to be its own video. For now, given that we’ve hit our theoretical limit
for the time being, let’s take yet another dive into the bowels of insanity, and check out
a bunch of Far Lands variations that I haven’t really given the spotlight all that much up
to this point. If you’ve enjoyed this video, please consider subscribing, because that’ll
do it for my commentary, for now. I hope you all enjoyed this video, my name is AntVenom, and I
bid you all farewell. Thanks so much for watching.
